Free Government Data: Access Sunlight Foundation APIs on a New Data Services Site by Liz Bartolomeo.
From the post:
The Sunlight Foundation is expanding its free data services with a new website – http://sunlightfoundation.com/api/ – to access our open government APIs. We offer APIs (a.k.a. application programming interfaces) for a number of our projects and tools and support a community of developers who create their own projects using this data.
Nonprofit organizations, political campaigns and media outlets use our collection of APIs, which cover topics such as the Congressional Record, lobbying records and state legislation. More than 7,000 people have registered for an API key, resulting in over 735 million API calls to date. Greenpeace uses congressional information available through Sunlight APIs on its activist tools, and the Wikimedia Foundation used Sunlight APIs to help people connect with their lawmakers in Congress during the SOPA debate last year. Those using Sunlight APIs run across the political spectrum, from the Obama-Biden campaign to the Tea Party Patriots.
From the API page:
Capitol Words API
The Capitol Words API is an API allowing access to the word frequency count data powering the Capitol Words project.
Congress API v3 API
A live JSON API for the people and work of Congress. Information on legislators, districts, committees, bills, votes, as well as real-time notice of hearings, floor activity and upcoming bills.
Influence Explorer API
The Influence Explorer API gives programmers and journalists the ability to easily create subsets of large data for their own research and development purposes. The API currently offers campaign contributions and lobbying records with more data sets coming soon.
Open States API
Information on the legislators and activities of all 50 state legislatures, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico.
Political Party Time API
Provides access to the underlying, raw data that the Sunlight Foundation creates based on fundraising invitations collected in Party Time. As we enter information on new invitations, the database updates automatically.
Commercial opportunity: The Sunlight Foundation data is a start towards public handicapping of members of Congress for votes on legislation.